Honolulu Completes Internet/Telephone-Only Election

from the how-open-was-it? dept

A few folks have submitted various versions of the news that Honolulu has concluded a city election of council members using only internet or telephone voting. Similar systems have been tried elsewhere, but for the most part, there's been fear to use them more widely in the US, over worries about hacking. Of course, at a time when we still can't even get basic stand-alone e-voting machines to work properly, I think there's still plenty to be worried about before jumping ahead to internet voting. There is a note at the end of the article, saying that the company that provided the technology, called Everyone Counts, says that the code for the systems used in the election are available for auditing. However, a quick glance of the company's website doesn't seem to reveal any code. So unless I'm missing something (in which case, please let us know in the comments!), it sounds like the code isn't open, but only available for auditing by a limited group of folks... just like traditional (buggy, problematic) e-voting systems. Update: And already there are questions about the election. Despite part of the reason for internet voting being that it would get more people involved a tiny 6.3% of the electorate participated raising numerous questions about why... and if the technology miscounted. If people don't trust the technology, they're not going to trust the results either...

Internet

Trust

Even if the technical solution were to work flawlessly it might still not be good choice. Elections are about trust and if not everybody can understand exactly how the votes are counted and determine whether the system is suspectible to fraud then the technology can undermine that trust.

Anonymity

There's no indication of how they preserved anonymity, either. In fact, it sounds like they sent each voter a personal code to use in voting which would seem to eliminate anonymity. It's easy to come up with an internet voting system like this that doesn't preserve anonymity. Coming up with one that does is a bit more difficult.